Today I'm to go pick up some girl I've never met and take her out to a movie along with my little half-brother and cousin. Unusual.

I think I'm starting to understand what recent frustrations in learning to use the tablet really are. As far as using the tablet and whatnot, I am actually doing fairly well with the learning curve. I mean, when I ink something digitally it looks pretty lame and tacky, but my inking looked pretty lame and tacky in real life when I was first learning to do it too. So there's nothing unusual about it, it just requires practice and experience. I get most frustrated when I try to color something. And I'm starting to realize that's about 25% unfamiliarity with how to make the coloring tools in any given program blend, and 75% just not knowing shit about painting altogether. I mean, I seriously have no experience at all with painting, traditionally or otherwise. A few art projects in the basic classes in high school, some Warhammer 40k models, and digitally cel-shading a bunch of comics are the extent of my experience in painting and color in any form. The reason I'm frustrated is I don't know shit. So I gotta learn some painting. Obviously the best way to do so would be to take a class on painting, and as soon as I can afford to eat more than spam and ramen I'll sign right up for one, but in the meantime, does anybody know of any really good digital coloring tutorials out there that can help me learn the basics of painting digitally, preferably with a variety of tools? And I'm not talking about the kind of tutorial that shows you the steps. The steps I have down like sauce. My problem is one of technique. I can't blend colors for shit and for the life of me I can't figure out how to make an airbrush tool make anything other than a solid block of color to save my life. Insightful material on how to mix and select colors might be cool too.

Now over to my co-topic: I've noticed there's an awful lot of people on DA who have a bug up their butt about folks adding their pictures to favorites without adding any comments to the pic itself. I don't quite understand why this is. In my experience, the point of commenting on artwork is or should be for people to critique the art, or to point out something specific about the picture that particularly stands out in a positive or negative manner, or make some other relevant statement of substance about the pic. I mean, there's nothing really wrong with comments that say "wow! i like very nice!" That's cool, they're very flattering. But most of the time if I'm going to go to the trouble of leaving a comment and cluttering up someone's message page, I'd more often only do it if I have something significant to say. And especially if I'm adding a pic to my favorites, there's no need to add a "wow! I like that!" comment. Adding the pic to my favorites pretty much accomplishes that in and of itself. I dunno, is it just a numbers thing? Quantity over quality? I mean, hey, I love every comment I recieve, but it makes me particularly tickled when a comment has a solid critique or commentary about my picture. And if somebody adds one of my pics to their favorites without commenting, that must be all they really have to say about it. That's cool with me honestly.

She's like, from Germany too. I don't even know if she speaks english. This is gonna be wierd.